Peter Schneider

Jane Schneider

Culture and Political Economy in Western Sicily presents the relationship between the early colonial period, a time when Sicily exported wheat and animal products, and a later neocolonial period, during which manpower is the principal energy loss. The book discusses the rise and development of the Mafia; cultural codes that are important to contemporary social Sicilian organization; and the origins of these codes in early adaptations of the Sicilian people to externally generated political and economic forces. The text will be of value to sociologists, economists, historians, and people who want a deeper understanding of the Mafia.

Culture and Political Economy in Western Sicily

Peter T. Schneider

Reversible Destiny traces the history of the Sicilian mafia to its nineteenth-century roots and examines its late twentieth-century involvement in urban real estate and construction as well as drugs. Based on research in the regional capital of Palermo, this book suggests lessons regarding secretive organized crime: its capacity to reproduce a subculture of violence through time, its acquisition of a dense connective web of political and financial protectors during the Cold War era, and the sad reality that repressing it easily risks harming vulnerable people and communities. Charting the efforts of both the judiciary and a citizen's social movement to reverse the mafia's economic, political, and cultural power, the authors establish a framework for understanding both the difficulties and the accomplishments of Sicily's multifaceted antimafia efforts.

Mafia, Antimafia, and the Struggle for Palermo

Reversible Destiny

Annotation A fascinating exploration of the history and organizational dynamics of the Sicilian Mafia, through which the authors lead us to an understanding of both the difficulties and accomplishments of Sicily's various antimafia efforts.

Rayna Rapp

Explores the full range of Eric R. Wolf's methods and concepts and pays tribute to his work in anthropology and history.

Exploring the Influence of Eric R. Wolf

Articulating Hidden Histories

Jane Schneider is a Professor of Anthropology, at the Graduate and University Center, City University of New York.

Orientalism in One Country

Italy's 'Southern Question'

The ‘Southern Question' has been a major topic in Italian political, economic and cultural life for a century and more. During the Cold War, it was the justification for heavy government intervention. In contemporary Italy, a major part of the appeal of the Lombard League has been its promise to dissociate the South from the North, even to the point of secession. The South also remains a resonant theme in Italian literature. This interdisciplinary book endeavours to answer the following: - When did people begin to think of the South as a problem? - Who - intellectuals, statisticians, criminologists, political exiles, novelists (among them some important southerners) - contributed to the discourse about the South and why? - Did their view of the South correspond to any sort of reality? - What was glossed over or ignored in the generalized vision of the South as problematic? - What consequences has the ‘Question' had in controlling the imaginations and actions of intellectuals and those with political and other forms of power? - What alternative formulations might people create and live by if they were able to escape from the control of the ‘Question' and to imagine the political, economic and cultural differences within Italy in some other way? This timely book reveals how Southern Italians have been affected by distorted versions of a complex reality similar to the discourse of ‘Orientalism'. In situating the devaluation of Southern Italian culture in relation to the recent emergence of ‘anti-mafia' ideology in the South and the threat posed to national unity by the Lombard League, it also illuminates the world's stiff inter-regional competition for investment capital.

Jane Schneider

Books

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